Battle for Academic Economists Is Heating Up

In the jockeying for position among America’s top economics departments, Stanford University and the University of Michigan are getting aggressive and plotting some big hires.

Stanford, for example, recently hired Alvin Roth, a Harvard University professor and pioneer in “market-design” theory who says he was drawn to the Silicon Valley campus partly because it’s in a “vibrant part of the economy.” The 60-year-old researcher, who specializes in designing markets like those that match medical-school residents to teaching hospitals, is a well-known economist who chairs the American Economic Association’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market.

Mr. Roth, who starts in September, joins a growing cadre of behavioral and “experimental” economists at Stanford — several of them his own former students — led by 39-year-old Jonathan Levin, who became chairman of the department last November after winning the prestigious John Bates Clark medal — the profession’s second-most important award after the Nobel prize. Mr. Roth says Stanford “worked at matching my Harvard package.”

“We seem to be fighting for a bunch of people,” says Nick Bloom, an associate professor of economics at Stanford — who says other top-name economists are in Stanford’s sights too. “I think in 25 years, if one university threatens Harvard’s dominance in the global rankings, it will be Stanford.”

John Campbell, the chair of Harvard’s economics department, said his school fought Stanford over three top Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D students this year, and two of them are coming to Harvard. But he declined to comment further.